Scifi Character - Head Sculpting Tips

[Simon]

Here are a few tips from my latest sculpt

Eye was a sphere with quad-cap turned off, so it was easy to detach parts of it for the iris and pupil, which were painted with vertex colours separately

Eye.png (356.1 KiB) Viewed 905 times

Head is a Lathe, starting in the Left viewport I trace the front then the back. In the Curves panel I use the button at the bottom to make a 3rd symmetrical curve on the side and edit into shape.

HeadLathe.png (237.92 KiB) Viewed 905 times

Then I place an eye (6 eyes wide head for female, 7 for male). I increase the poly count to about 20000 with the resolution slider then draw a simple brow, cheek and eye hollow

Eyed.png (295.07 KiB) Viewed 905 times

Once I've hollowed out the eye to a depth that shows the eyeball, I fill it back in to hide the ball. Then with a small brush I cut into the eyelid, and sharpen up the eyelids.
Use a large brush to add a nose in front view - keeping an eye on the left view to get the right shape. Always using symmetrical sculpting.
The original lathe already has a bit of a sticking out muzzle - so instead of 'adding' lips I use a negative brush with pinch turned up to 25% and cut the line between the upper and lower lips. Finally use a low intensity brush to sharpen the top and bottom of the lips.

Paint a bit more definition in the brow, cheek, jaw. Then I get to painting wrinkles - using fade-in and fade-out painting to make the wrinkles more subtle.
The outer rim of the ear is a single line, and then I use brushes to build up volume from the main head object into the ear outline.

Using MirrorGroup for the eye and ear is helpful.

MH1.png (362.95 KiB) Viewed 905 times

Made liberal use of this custom made texture as colour and bumpmap. I used GIMP "Filters/Map/Tile Seamless..." to make it repeat.

Map.png (387.92 KiB) Viewed 902 times

Here is the final character - the rest was made with Curvy Objects and no further sculpting required.

Fighter1s.png (1.12 MiB) Viewed 905 times